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I’ve been writing this blog since 2009, but there still seem to be plenty of interesting topics to mull over. You can subscribe (it’s free) to follow the blog by email – each new post will pop into your inbox.
Wall Street Journal reviews my book
This weekend my book Women and the Piano is reviewed by Diane Cole in the Wall Street Journal. I don't think my books have ever come to the attention of the WSJ before, so I am delighted to be included. Only subscribers can read the full review, but this link at least...
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A podcast for the ‘Brainland’ series
I have done an interview for the 'Brainland' podcast, a series 'where neuroscience, the arts and humanities mingle'. An old college friend, doctor and cellist Steve Brown, interviewed me about how I got started in music, how I got into chamber music, what motivates...
Edinburgh Book Festival programme announced
The Edinburgh Book Festival has just announced its programme for this summer. I will be taking part on Sunday 11 August at 6.45pm, talking to Kate Molleson about my book Women and the Piano. I'm delighted to be included in this very popular festival. This year the...
Children’s voices
This morning in the village church of Cerne Abbas, we invited the children of the local primary school to come and listen to a rehearsal of Aaron Copland's attractive piece, Appalachian Spring (part of tonight's concert programme). It lasts around 25 minutes, quite a...
Summer music
I'm in rural Dorset to take part in one of those thriving summer music festivals never mentioned in the Guardian's guide to same. This will be the 21st annual festival run by the Gaudier Ensemble; I've been 'at the piano' for eighteen of those years. Despite the...
Blackbirds’ songs
We have a pair of resident blackbirds in our garden, and every day the male blackbird perches on the chimney and sings loudly, especially at dusk. He seems to have several ‘songs’ or sequences of phrases which he sings over and over. I’ve heard them hundreds of times,...
Upgrading to modern sonorities
An interesting discussion with students about whether it’s right to ‘scale things up’ to 21st century tastes when playing 18th/19th century music. They had played Beethoven so powerfully and with such speed and ringing ‘attack’ that I found myself wondering whether...
Riverside nonsense
To Cambridge, where I heard a fine May Week concert at King’s College. (As Clive James pointed out in the title of a book of memoirs, May Week is in June.) It was great to hear that the tradition of excellent music-making continues, even though ‘performance’ is only a...
Voting systems
I wish I could have been a fly on the wall during the jury’s deliberations on the Cardiff Singer of the World final on Sunday night. I’d watched most of the other rounds and had realised it was going to be a difficult choice. It was an exceptionally good line-up, and...
Old Sussex surnames
After I had finished my rehearsal in Rye Church in East Sussex the other day, I was standing outside the church waiting for the rain to stop, and my eye fell on the War Memorial commemorating local men who had given their lives in the World Wars of 1914-19 and...
‘A History of Modern Music’
I yield to no-one in my devotion to The Guardian, which I read every day, but I’ve been struck recently by what seems to be a disturbing policy of excluding classical music from discussions of ‘music’. A few weeks ago the paper published a 50-page guide to summer...
Off to the Florestan Festival
I'm off to the Florestan Festival in East Sussex today. I always enjoy imagining people setting off towards Peasmarsh from many different compass points. Most of our rehearsals have happened to the accompaniment of pouring rain, so we can only hope the spell of wet...
Le Quattro Volte
Saw a quietly beautiful Italian film, Le Quattro Volte, directed by Michelangelo Frammartino. It was inspired by Pythagoras's belief that each of us contains four interlinked lives: human, animal, vegetable and mineral. 'Man is made of mineral, because he has a...
Jazz at Wigmore
A lovely evening at Wigmore Hall last night listening to jazz from pianist Gwilym Simcock and 'reeds' player Klaus Gesing. What a well-matched duo they are, both superb musicians and excellent instrumentalists as well. Their ensemble playing was a lesson in how to be...
‘High art’ and politicians
On Monday, Mark Lawson wrote in the Guardian about how politicians are averse to being associated with 'high art' because they don't wish to be seen as 'élitist'. In today's paper there are several letters in reply, one of them from me.